In the end, Clio’s newspaper contact – young, hungry, barely able to contain himself over the magnitude of the story that had fallen into his lap – had done all the sleuthing for them. They were helped by a whistleblower: another former police spy who had been embedded in the anti-fascist movement, who came forward after the first allegations broke. He’d been one of Mark’s – Michael’s – colleagues. Through this man’s transcript, she learned that the undercover cops referred to them all, all the people they were spying on, as ‘wearies’. An under-race, dreadlocked and earnest, unwashed and stupid; a different class of person. Maybe not a person at all. That will occur to Sam at nights, when she’s lying there by herself, while Dale’s big body sweats and farts beside her and there’s no one at all to get her out of this. Maybe he didn’t see her as a person. A body, right enough. A sexy body, and a passport into all this. She provided him with legitimacy; a young black girlfriend with impeccable radical credentials. Her nineteen-year-old body gave him cover and pleasure, and the rest didn’t matter, because she wasn’t a person. Not like the people he knew.

She flashes on to his face, again and again, the face of someone who did not exist. He had only ever been a performance, a sleight of hand and costume. She will imagine this man, this stranger, Michael Carrington, this Oxford-educated former public schoolboy, sneering at them all as he makes his monthly reports, sneering and despising the people he eats and sleeps and builds things with, the people he says he loves.

‘“My hope is that by coming forward I’ll be able to shine a spotlight on this gross abuse of police power,” Campbell said. “By being honest about what’s been done to me here, in the United Kingdom, not in a so-called police state – and, let’s be clear, what I experienced was nothing less than state-sanctioned rape—” Are you all right, love?’ Dale put the paper down, stopped reading.

‘I don’t want to hear any more just now, OK?’

Sam turned up the volume on the telly. It amazed her that it all just seemed to happen, while she sat on the sofa with three days of baby sick on her tracky bottoms, seeing nobody but medical professionals. She’d been unable to produce any milk to feed Elliot. It felt like it had solidified in there, mastitis hitting her like flu. The community midwife put her cold hands on Sam’s concrete-hard breasts, trying to milk her like a cow, but nothing came.

‘Not to worry, Mummy. He’s taking the bottle like a lickle champ, isn’t he. Now. Shall we just pop your pants off and see how your perineum’s doing?’